“Except now I’m running,” he wheezed.
“Yes. Your odds of making it through this are dropping dramatically,” Wally said solemnly. “Good luck.”
My lips twitched. I wasn’t even sure she knew she was being funny, which only made her funnier.
The alley was easy going, smooth with no visible obstacles—and that made me nervous. There was a sudden shout up ahead, then a series of shouts that turned into screams. A normal person would have stopped, maybe turned and made a run for it.
I picked up speed, following instincts hammered into me my whole life. If someone screamed, you hurried to help.
Pete and Wally hissed at me to slow down, to stay back, to take it easy, but I kept running until the alley came to a T-intersection. I paused there, waiting for a noise to pull me in one direction or the other.
A whimper, barely above a whisper, drew me to the left. I crouched, pressing my hip against the building as my hand slid to the knife sheath on my other hip. I pulled the homemade blade free.
Just in case.
A small part of my brain tried to point out the insanity of what was happening, which didn’t follow any pattern I’d learned over the last eighteen years of life. The voice was only trying to keep me safe, but I’d gotten good at telling it to shut up.
A light above a doorway on the other side of the alley flickered to life. At the base of the entrance lay a crumpled figure, blood clearly visible against his hair. I’d seen him with the Bro Pack at the beginning. The smallest of the bunch, he was fair-haired to the point of being white blond and slight, barely five feet, if that. Sam would have outweighed him, and she was a waif.
The shuffle of boots on the pavement.
“Don’t leave me,” the crouched figure whimpered, curling tighter around himself.
“Kill the goblin, we don’t need him,” a voice shouted from the other side of the light. Highbrow, cultured, and cruel, the voice was the epitome of good breeding gone terribly wrong. My lips curled. And then my brain tried to linger on the goblin bit. Nope, not going there, I didn’t have time to process it.
A spatter of laughter followed the Bro’s pronouncement, followed by the sound of feet running from the scene. Four hulking figures stepped out of the shadows, surrounding the kid on the ground. These were not eighteen-year-old students—the maze had revealed its first challenge.
I smelled Pete before he reached me, a faint musk. I crinkled my nose. A heavy breath escaped him. “That’s a goblin,” he whisper-gasped. “The thugs there can deal with him. We can slip by, use him for distraction like the others did.”
Wally—only a second behind Pete—nodded. “That plan will give us the best chances of survival, easily increasing our odds by seventy-five percent.”
Sure, if we wanted to sacrifice someone to save ourselves.
I didn’t work like that. I wasn’t leaving the kid to those thugs. Goblin or not, he didn’t deserve this. “You two slip by first, I’ll follow and cover the rear.” They didn’t have to know what I was planning.
Wally crept ahead, pinning her back to the side of the building. Her eyes widened as she hit the edge of the light thrown by that single flickering lamp. Her entire body was visible to the thugs, but their eyes were on the small kid who’d tucked his body around himself, pressing against the wall like he hoped to disappear into it.
No doubt he’d thought he’d be safe going in with a big group of guys. But they hadn’t lured their bait in the same way the girls ahead of them had. They’d flat out taken him with them, promising him safety in numbers.
Anger snapped up and through me. It was one thing to lure stupids after you, another to make a false promise of safety to someone who trusted you.
I motioned for Freckles to go, and he stepped surprisingly light on his feet, following Wally.
There was a thud of a boot hitting a body. I couldn’t wait for Pete to get all the way across.
Sorry, bud.
I stepped into the light. “Y’all are pretty tough, huh, beating up on one kid? Four against, one? Really?” Pete squeaked, clearly visible to the four oversized thugs as they did a slow turn in unison.
I’d like to say in that moment I wasn’t afraid, that I didn’t take half a step back, that I didn’t consider my poor life choices, including that one, in a single flash, but that would be a lie. The thugs…they didn’t have faces. I mean like nothing. No eyes. No lips. Nothing, just a blank canvas of pasty white with weird stringy hair that hung past where ears should be. These creatures were not people, not even close to human.
Terror tripped along my spine and it made my mouth do terrible things.
“You got a felt marker? I could draw you in some eyebrows. Nice big bushy ones.” I grinned through the fear, feeling the wild in me surge up and out.
Reckless, I know.
The one thing closest to me lifted a hand that held a short knife. I mimicked him. “You’d make amazing mimes. Like fantastic. Probably make a lot of money if you took your show on the road. You’d conquer one curb at a time.”
“I’m going to pee my pants,” Pete squeaked.
The knife-wielding faceless thing lunged at me, knife in a straight thrust for my guts. I danced to the side and swung a slice of my own with my blade, cutting across its arm. I grimaced as the blade dug into bone. A spurt of blood was sure to follow with a blow. Great gushes of it. Or something, there should have been something.
I yanked my knife back and the thug didn’t slow, not for a split second, nor was there a single splatter of red.
Another of the hulking creatures went for Pete. I cut the thing off, knifing it where the kidney should be. It swung to face me, and I dropped to a knee, rolling out of the way.
Pete—bless his stupid heart—jumped into the fray. With their backs to him, the creatures didn’t see him coming.
“I’ll get this one, Billy!” he yelled as he climbed up the back of the brute closest to him. I couldn’t help but stare.
How in the heck had he done that? Like he’d had handholds on the back of the—thing. I needed to understand what I was dealing with if I was going to beat them.
“Wally, what are they?” I yelled as I stepped closer to one of the creatures and kicked out, smashing my boot into the inside of its knee. The crunch was solid, and on a person would have shattered the bones, displacing the knee cap and rendering them pretty much useless. Not so much here. The beastie barely bobbled on its legs.
“Golems,” Wally called out. “Anthropomorphic creatures made entirely from inanimate matter. They are controlled by their creator from a safe distance. Less than point-zero-zero-one percent of deaths have been caused by golems. But, to be fair, all of those deaths occurred within the Culling Trials.”
Of course, they had.
Wally paused. “They are Jewish of origin if that helps.”
“It does not!” I yelled as I ducked a knife swipe at my head. “Unless one of you is Jewish and knows what to do?”
Neither of them answered, which said it all.
“I got this one!” Pete yelped as he wrapped his arms around the neck of the golem he’d climbed, letting his legs swing out wide.
It was quite the sight. The rodeos at home had nothing on this.
“Fantastic info, Wally, but how do we stop them?” I dodged a big boot coming my way, straight for my head. They were bendy bastards for being so big. The blow meant for my face missed so narrowly I could feel the wind slap my cheek.
“You don’t kill them,” the goblin kid on the ground said. “You leave them someone to torment while you continue on. That is how this works.”
“Not today it doesn’t,” I said as I slid between the golems, keeping them swinging, arms and feet going in all directions. If I got close enough, maybe I could get them to smash into each other. “Pete, get ready to bail.”
I put myself between two of the golems, keeping my hands at my sides. “Come on, ugly boys, let’s see what you’ve got.”
They swung
for my head at the same time, one from the right, one from the left, and I dropped to the ground just before they struck flesh. They crashed into each other with an enormous cracking bang, like Humpty Dumpty having a really bad day, and I scrambled across the ground to the kid still crouched against the wall. I glanced behind me. The two golems now lay on the ground flat on their backs, blocking the paths of the other two. Beautiful.
Pete had bailed and was nowhere to be seen. For the moment, we were good, but it wouldn’t last. “Time to move.”
The kid’s eyes lifted to mine—huge, round eyes that were totally out of proportion with the rest of his face. “Why are you doing this? Nobody helps in the Culling Trials.”
I wasn’t about to tell him that he reminded me of Billy. That if my little brother had come instead of me, he probably would have made the same mistake as this kid—he would have hooked up with the big boys, thinking he’d be safe with them.
No one would have saved Billy, but I could save this kid.
“Not the time.” I grabbed him by the arm and swung him up onto my back. How many times had I done this same move with Sam? Hundreds. And he was far lighter than she was even now.
I dodged the now stumbling golems, driving a foot into the knees of the two still standing, slowing them down. They were freaky to look at, but slow and dumb. Not much of a challenge if you asked me.
“Run,” I said to Pete and Wally as I took off, the new kid clinging to my back like an oversized monkey.
“They’ll track us,” Pete said. “Golems don’t give up their prey easily.”
“Doubt it.” I shot back. “If this is a trial, then there will be something else up ahead of us. The golems,” cripes, I could not believe I was saying that word as if it were real, “won’t follow us far. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be anything left here for the kids who come after us. We just have to get to the next obstacle as quickly as we can.”
“That seems like a bad idea,” the kid on my back said. “Quick is death in the Culling Trials.”
“Well, moving slow wasn’t doing you any good,” I pointed out.
“Touché,” he said. “My name is Gregory.”
“Gregory Goblin?” Pete snickered. “Did your parents think you were going to end up in a comic book?”
Gregory’s hands drifted to the top of my collarbone as I jogged along, precariously close to the girls. That was not happening.
“Okay, ride’s over.” I let go of him, dropping him to the ground abruptly.
He yelped as he hit the pavement, rolled, and came to his feet.
“Dumb jerk,” he snapped up at me as he dusted off clothes that were nicer than anything I’d ever had in my closet. Did goblins have money? Or style for that matter? Apparently so.
“Yeah, well, this jerk just saved your butt, Gregory Goblin,” I said. I checked my ball cap, tugging the rim to make sure it was on good and tight. This whole acting, looking, and talking like a guy thing was a lot of work. And I kept forgetting about the part I was supposed to be playing, which didn’t help.
“Um, Billy?” Pete said.
“Call me Wild,” I replied without thinking.
“I think we have a new problem.”
Of course, we did. I made a slow turn and let out a big breath as I took in the scene ahead of us. “Jesus Murphy on a limping donkey, do we ever.”
Chapter 11
Screams erupted back the way we’d come, followed by the sound of distant thumps. The golems had forgotten about us, just as I’d predicted.
A whole new problem lay ahead in this city of death we were trapped in. My eyes locked on what I could only see as a wall of death and dismemberment.
I didn’t mean figuratively either. The ground dipped easily ten feet into a hole that stretched the width of the alley from building to building. The ditch, if it could be called that, was six feet wide, and ended in a metal wall stretching up and out of sight into a bank of fog. It resembled an oversized chicken wire fence with large blades jutting out at random intervals, which would force an intrepid climber along a particular path. I blinked and the blades closest to the ground drew back and popped out somewhere else on the wall. A faint dusting of rain pattered down around us. Not fog, then. Clouds. Wet metal was a right bitch to climb, slippery and cold. I flexed my hands, already sizing up the best path to take, timing the emergence of the blades.
“Okay, so I’ve seen worse,” I said.
The buzz of electricity cut through the air, and the hair along my arms stood as parts of the wall glowed blue, sizzling against the rain.
“Really?” Gregory said beside me, rubbing his arms. “You’ve seen worse?”
I was going to answer but was interrupted by a bellow of pain somewhere above us. Way above us.
Pete swallowed hard enough that it was audible.
“Falls equate for a sum total of over six hundred fifty thousand, five hundred twenty deaths a year. Globally, that is,” Wally said softly, the fear in her voice palpable.
“I’ve seen worse. We can do this,” I repeated, more for myself than the others. “If those ladies in black ahead of us could get through, then so can we.”
“Those ladies in black,” Gregory said, “are from some of the longest lines of assassins this world has ever seen.”
“Then we need to figure out how they did it.” I took a few steps toward the ditch. The marks on the edge showed fresh scuffs left by the Bros who’d jumped across, pushing hard to make the full six-foot leap. I frowned as I lowered my gaze to the base of the ditch. I crouched and put my hands on the lip of the ditch, feeling the marks, seeing others that weren’t immediately visible if you were, say, running from the golems.
This challenge was like going through the most violent haunted house I’d ever thought possible. But it was a puzzle too—one with deadly stakes.
I wasn’t about to tell the others that I kinda liked it.
My wrist vibrated and I glanced at the watch as a message flashed across it.
Getting passed is bad for your health.
“Did you just get that message too?” I looked up at the other three and they nodded in unison.
Which meant we had to go.
Gregory launched across the open space, covering it easily, and began to climb the wall, his words echoing my thoughts. “We have to move!”
Only we didn’t have to move, at least, not in the direction he was going. Not if the marks under my hands were any indication. “That’s not the way.”
Pete all but danced at my side, his feet tapping out a rhythm.
“You gotta pee still?” I asked.
“Yeah, when I get nervous.” And he just whipped it out and started to whizz right in front of me. Like I was one of the guys. Which, of course, I was supposed to be. Wally squeaked and spun her back to him.
“Not in the ditch, you idiot!” I shoved him on the hip, turning him away from the hole.
“Why not?” He looked over his shoulder at me.
I lowered myself along the edge of the ditch, avoiding the splash of piss. “Because it’s where we’re going.”
Wally nodded and sidestepped him. “That’s good. I don’t think anyone has died in a ditch. At least, not that I know of.”
I wanted to ask her about the first two world wars but refrained.
My feet landed on much softer ground, boots sinking down with my weight. Mud, liquid mud. It had better just be mud seeing as there were no cows around. Wally slid down the side of the ditch and landed with a sloppy splash, Pete next, and remarkably enough, even Gregory.
“Change your mind?”
“I hate climbing.” He wouldn’t make eye contact with me, which was fine. Let him keep his pride.
Pete grabbed my arm. “I can smell cotton candy perfume. One of the girls was wearing that. They did come down this way. But how did you know?”
I pointed at the faint depressions in the soft ground, wondering how he’d smelled anything over the heavy scent of earth…and urine. But he was rig
ht—now that he’d pointed it out, I could pick up a faint cotton candy scent.
“Footprints,” I said. I’d only seen them once I’d crouched. Even then, if I hadn’t taken a moment to process what I was seeing, I would have missed them. Just like everyone who’d leapt at the obvious path. “Let’s go. I don’t want anyone else figuring this out if we can help it. Gregory, give me your coat.”
“What are you going to do with it? You’re too big,” Gregory said, but he did hand it over.
I pushed the three of them ahead of me and then used his coat to brush away the footprints we left behind as best I could. “Covering our tracks.” It wasn’t as good as tree branch, but it would do the job.
They stepped ahead as I swept the area. I had to trust that they wouldn’t go too far—and they didn’t. I bumped into them as I reached the end of my sweeping job. They’d gathered under an overhang of street that hid us from the open mouth of the ditch. Again, you wouldn’t have seen the overhang or the tunnel until you were in the ditch. “What are you waiting for?”
“It’s locked.” Pete jangled something metallic.
I turned to see a five-foot-tall gate that led underground, and by the initial direction, under all the buildings. From the gate hung a brand new lock. Too fresh, too new. I would have laid money that the ladies in black ahead of us had locked the gate. I sighed. “Any of you picked locks before?” I had, but I felt someone else needed to step up and show off their skills. That’s what this place was about, right?
Gregory nodded. “I have.” He held up his hands, showing off long, almost delicate looking fingers. “I’m quite good at it actually. I just need something to work with.”
“Would a bobby pin work?” Wally asked.
Gregory nodded, and she pulled one from her hair. I wasn’t sure it was even holding anything up. Almost like she’d decided to put a few bobby pins in for an emergency. Which, given how much she and Pete knew about the trials, was a distinct possibility.
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